Clan MacFarlane Worldwide, Inc.

Diaspora 18 August 2026 - Back to School 2026

I couldn’t wait for school to start!  I remember those days.  Mother would take us shopping for our crayons, pencils, glue, and a good eraser and a cigar box to hold our supplies.  Then we would get new shoes and one outfit to start out the year.  No backpacks in those days.  Nope.  We had to carry our stack of newly issued hard-bound books all the way home so we could cover them oh-so-carefully in grocery store brown paper bags.  It was our introduction into the fine art of origami, of sorts, and a labor of love.  And then we would stack those books on top of our new 3-ring binder filled with tons of 3-hole-punched lined paper.  I loved school and especially enjoyed the anticipation of starting a new year. 

As a young child in New Jersey, I remember starting right before Labor Day.  It was hot.  It was miserably hot; the kind of heat where your eyes rolled around in your head challenging you to keep them open while your teacher was giving instructions. There was no air conditioning, and staying awake in class was nearly impossible.  If you were lucky, you had a seat by the window where you might catch a breeze.  I remember thinking how stupid it was to start school so early when it was obviously such a perfect day to be at the swimming pool instead of in a hot classroom.

When my children were in school in Utah, school was all year.  Seriously!  They would go to school for several weeks and then have a couple of weeks off.  I think this was an experiment to ensure students would not lose ground with their learned skills.  Parents grumbled about childcare, but the children just didn’t seem to care.  They were on break every couple of weeks, so why would they complain?!

I checked school terms and holidays in Scotland and was sent to a government page:  mygov.scot, where you could look up your school’s dates by council.  I chose Aberdeen Council where it appears the children started August 17^th.  They have 4 terms with fairly lengthy breaks between terms.  The children are out for the summer on the 2^nd of July.  The same is true for the Highland Council; students attend from mid-August until the first week of July.  Wow!  Pretty hard core!

As for me, by spring, the charm of school had worn off, and I was just ready for that summer respite.   I counted the days until I could sleep late and then head to the swimming pool.  When summer break finally arrived, I read my Nancy Drew mysteries, caught lightning bugs, rode my bike, and got glorious sunburn after sunburn at the pool.  But then, August would roll around, and there was that familiar tug of anticipation.  I could not wait for school to start!